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The following data is extracted from Cherokee of the Smoky Mountains.

republican government modeled after that of the United States, and seven years later they adopted a constitution.

This was an assumption of distinct nationality, and their sovereignty was recognized by the United States. They passed laws for the collection of taxes, for repairs on roads, for the support of schools, for the suppression of intemperance and polygamy, and for preventing the sale of lands to the whites without the consent of the national council.

And now occurred among these Indians, from within, an astounding development of culture which for originality and swiftness of accomplishment has no precedent nor parallel in the history of the human race.

There was a Cherokee of mixed blood named Sequoya (Se-quah-yah) who through an accident in hunting had become a cripple for life. Being unable to follow the chase, he took to sedentary occupations and developed considerable mechanical skill, especially in silver-working. He never learned to speak English, and of course could neither read nor write.

Sequoya had observed that the whites had a way of "talking on paper" whereby messages were sent and records were preserved. It set him to brooding over a project for devising a similar system for his own people. Being an old-fashioned Indian true to his own religion, he did not seek help from the missionaries, and they in turn discouraged him. But by himself he pondered long and earnestly over the mystery of the talking paper.

Like every other inventor of writing he began by trying to make a separate symbol for every word or idea. This proved an utterly hopeless scheme. In Cherokee there were thousands and tens of thousands of words. Even if so many symbols were designed, yet no man could remember half of them.

After years of hard study, in the face of ridicule and repeated failures, Sequoya finally began analyzing his language into its component sounds. He had no conception of vowels and consonants, but he picked out the distinct syllables of his mother tongue and found there were only one hundred and fifteen.

Then came the brilliant solution of his problem; he would assign a separate character to each syllable, and any word in

Source: Cherokee of the Smoky Mountains

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